Daniel Alarcon - Lost City Radio

“We’ll stay,” she said with a nod. “Did everyone know this but me?”

“In the village? No, only a few.”

“But they all knew my husband?”

“Sure,” Manau said. “Adela — Victor’s mother — she told me he came three times a year.”

“Sometimes four. He was working on…” Norma trailed off. What a helpless feeling. “Oh, it doesn’t matter what he told me, does it?” she said, her voice cracking. What hadn’t he lied about? This other woman — Norma very nearly retched at the thought, some jungle tramp fucking her Rey, their bodies pressing together, their sweat, their odors. Their pleasure. She covered her eyes. She couldn’t speak.

“I’m not happy,” Manau said. “I didn’t want to tell you this.”

“And I didn’t want to hear it.” Norma peeked through her fingers.

He nodded, and bowed his head, staring into his lap. “They love you in the village, Miss Norma.”

She took his hand and thanked him. “This drawing,” she asked. “Where did it come from?”

“There was an artist who came to the village. Years ago.”

She looked back at the portrait. “His hair is so white,” she said. She couldn’t remember if he had looked this old when she last saw him.

Her head hurt. She meant to ask for an explanation, but didn’t. Or couldn’t. A muffled voice came from the kitchen.

“He didn’t make it, did he?” Norma said.

“Madam?”

“He didn’t survive. I’m asking.”

“You don’t know?” Manau said.

“Isn’t it obvious by now that I don’t know anything?” It took all the calm she could muster not to yell it.

“They took him. It’s what Victor’s mother told me.”

“They?”

“The army.”

“Oh,” Norma whispered.

WHEN REY returned from the jungle after meeting his newborn son, he had resolved to end his activities. He hadn’t seen his contact since Yerevan was disappeared. It was all too exhausting. He felt, for the first time, that he had brought home some of the forest with him, something affecting and real, a germ, a curse. His life — his lives, their carefully maintained boundaries now breached, seemed overwhelmingly complex. He found himself thinking of the child the way a father ought to: with pride, with impressive and unexpected swells of love clouding his thoughts at the most inopportune moments. More than anything, he wanted to share this illicit joy with Norma, and this shamed him. What right did he have to be happy? Still, these things cannot be helped: they are biological, evolutionary. He wished he had a wallet-sized photograph of the boy — to show whom exactly? Strangers, he supposed. On the bus, he could pretend he was a real father, that he’d done nothing wrong. On more than one occasion, after a deep yawn, he explained to a passenger in the seat beside him, always a woman, that he was exhausted because the baby had been up all night. He said it knowingly, nonchalantly, or tried to. He liked the way the women smiled at him, the way they nodded and understood. They spoke of their own young ones, then pictures were shown, and good wishes offered. At home, he and Norma made love every night; at his insistence, they returned to the debauched and beautiful rituals of the first days of their pairing: sex in the morning, before dinner, before sleeping. Norma was happy, they were both happy, until some dark thought intruded and he remembered the kind of man he was, the kind who would lie and make mistakes and one day bring home a child from the jungle to be raised in the city. It was what had to happen: his son would have to be educated. He couldn’t very well leave the boy to play in the dirt, could he? But he and Norma would have their own child first, Rey decided optimistically: the two of them, and it would be wonderful, and in this way, she would forgive him.

At the university one day, he decided to take a walk. It was between classes, an hour and a half when he might have stayed in his classroom reading or correcting papers, but it was a nice afternoon, breezy, with skies that could be mistaken for clear. There were students about in packs, and it struck Rey that he could scarcely remember his own days as an undergraduate. It hadn’t come easy — he remembered that. He spent a year trying to get in. He did three years, then went to the Moon, returned a year later to resume his studies, and the two parts of his higher education seemed altogether unrelated. He met Norma, he met the man in the wrinkled suit, and this pair had changed everything he thought he knew about his life. Now Rey wandered off campus to the avenue, and then to the corner just past the university gates. There was a newsstand there, and a crowd of young men reading the headlines with hands in their pockets. Rey bought a sports paper, scanned the headlines. A rust-colored car idled at the corner, the radio blaring through the open windows. The driver wore mirrored sunglasses and tapped the steering wheel with his fingers. There was a girlie magazine open on the dashboard. Farther along, beneath a tattered awning, a man in a green vest sold puppies. He had a half-dozen in a single cage atop a slanting wooden table: eyes shut, tiny, the puppies awoke yawning, pawed around, and fell back asleep. The little beasts were putting on a show. A crowd of children had dragged their mothers to see them. A black-haired boy nervously poked his finger through the wire cage; an obliging puppy licked it sleepily, and the boy squealed with pleasure. Rey stood to watch, newspaper under his arm. He was watching the children, he realized, and not the puppies. I’ll bring my boy here, Rey thought. Why not? I’ll get him a dog. Various images of domesticity played out before him, and he smiled. Just then, a man tapped him on the shoulder. “Uncle,” a voice said.

The man had the boyish face of a high school senior, probably didn’t even shave yet, but something in his manner of dress was wrong. “What are you reading, Uncle?”

“Excuse me?”

“What’ve you got there?” the young man asked, pointing to the newspaper.

“Sports. Why?”

The young man frowned. “Let me begin again.” He pulled a badge from his pocket and flashed it, just fast enough that Rey could see its glint. “ID, please,” he said in a low voice. “Don’t make a fuss in front of the kids.”

“Oh,” Rey said, “is that what this is?” He smiled. These undercovers were getting younger and younger. He’d become accustomed to this, and never again would he make the mistake he’d made the night he met Norma. Just show them something, that was the rule now, show them anything. They weren’t looking for you, because if they were, they’d already have you. Rey took his wallet from his back pocket, made a show of taking out his university ID. “No fussing in front of the kids. And how old are you?”

“I’ll ignore that.” The undercover looked the ID over and nodded. “I thought it was you, professor. Trini was my captain,” he said, handing the ID back. “Come with me.”

“Trini?”

The undercover nodded.

“Do I have to?”

“You should.”

They walked together a ways, down the avenue past the next intersection, where the neighborhood began to change. Rey was determined not to pay attention to the cop. The clouds had thinned, and it was nearly sunny. A child craned his neck out of a second-story window of a dilapidated tenement, gazing wide-eyed at the street. Rey waved, and the boy waved back. The building was in such disrepair, it seemed held together by the clotheslines of its unfortunate residents. The boy ducked behind a curtain, returning a moment later with a stuffed teddy bear. The bear and the boy waved together.

Rey and the officer turned at the corner onto a nearly empty, unpaved street. A woman dunked her clothes into a bucket of water. She didn’t look up at them. They were blocks from the university now. “What’s this all about?” Rey asked.